Atari

The last time I wrote about RollerCoaster Tycoon World, I said the game looked bad. Because, well, it did. I was hardly the only one, writer or otherwise, to say as much. Atari certainly heard.
Flash forward to now, and we've...

Atari has taken a break from bullying indie developers to release Asteroids: Outpost, a gross and twisted cash-in on the beloved space shooter that first delighted arcade patrons in 1979.
The "open world sandbox survival game...

In case you missed it, we recently got a glimpse of the new RollerCoaster Tycoon installment and oh boy did it look like complete dog shit. Granted, graphics aren't the biggest expectation when it comes to a game like this, ...

Mar 19 //
Kyle MacGregorShortly after TxK's launch last year, Atari began to browbeat Minter and Llamasoft over the game.
In a letter dated June 9, 2014, the company's legal representation argued TxK infringed on Atari's intellectual property, calling the game a "blatant copy of the Tempest games" utterly devoid of any semblance of originality. Atari demanded TxK be removed from the market, and requested any copies be destroyed, deleted, or delivered to Atari along with the title's source code.
Nearly a year later, Minter decided to let the world know, allowing months upon months of frustrations boil over via Twitter. "I am beyond disgusted," he wrote. " I could never have imagined one day being savaged by [Atari's] undead corpse, my own seminal work turned against me."
Minter was also taken aback by the tone of the letter, which asserts Minter merely updated the original game, downplaying his involvement with the revival. "No amount of legal mumbo jumbo can erase the fact that I designed and coded Tempest 2000," he retorted. "The fact that they are willing to pay someone to wilfully [sic] distort the truth in that fashion says it all about them really."
It isn't the first time Minter's former employer distorted something to his detriment.
Over on his website, Minter rebuffed Atari's arguments regarding TxK's originality, or lack thereof. He recalled there is actually precedent regarding how distinct games must be to be considered different under the law, which, funnily enough, involves both Tempest 2000 and Atari.
Do you remember there was a PlayStation port of Tempest 2000 called "Tempest X"? I always wondered why the name was changed, and other little aspects of the gameplay were altered. years later I managed to chat online with the guy who did the port, and he told me that the changes were made "to reduce the royalty burden."
How so? Well, my original arrangement with Atari was that I was to receive a royalty on any ports of Tempest 2000. "Tempest X" was made exactly enough different that it would be legally considered a different game, cutting me out of any royalties.
Minter notes Tempest 2000 and Tempest X share the same source code, soundtrack, and power-up progression. Tempest 2000 was even included in X as a hidden unlockable. "Yet now," Minter writes, "Atari claim that TxK is in fact *closer* legally to Tempest 2000 than Tempest X was."
Destructoid reached out to Atari for comment and received the following in response:
Atari values and protects its intellectual property and expects others to respect its copyrights and trademarks. When Llamasoft launched TxK in early 2014, Atari was surprised and dismayed by the very close similarities between TxK and the Tempest franchise. Atari was not alone in noticing the incredible likeness between the titles. Several major gaming outlets also remarked at the similarity of features and overall appearance of TxK to Tempest; one stated of TxK, “This is essentially Tempest.” There is no lawsuit. Atari has been in continuous contact with the developer since the game launched in hopes that the matter would be resolved.
Atari also quoted a trio of reviews from IGN, GameSpot, and Gaming Nexus to support its point.
However, while the company claims says its doing this to protect its marks, Minter points out there are many Tempest clones floating around the mobile space "unmolested."
The man now seems to want the company to just leave him alone. Minter says he is working on a new project that is "literally another world away from anything 'Atari.'"
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Perhaps Atari will spawn a Tempest MMO, like the recently announced Asteroids: Outpost.

New ports of spiritual successor TxK 'will now never see the light of day'Atari thought it was "absolutely rubbish," the Jaguar designer told developer Jeff Minter in 1993. The man felt compelled to pull Minter aside at the console's launch party and let him know how little Atari thought of Minter'...

Back in 2010, Atari published Blade Kitten, a middling sidescrolling action-platformer about a bounty hunter who is both a human and a cat. In the years since, developer Krome Studios (Ty the Tasmanian Tiger) acquired the rig...

Mmm. There's no getting around it: RollerCoaster Tycoon World looks bad.
I thought my expectations for the graphics were reasonable -- I've seen screenshots and they seemed adequate, if dated -- but in motion everything has become clear. You'd think this would be more of an upgrade from RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 considering that released over a decade ago.
How disappointing.

Asteroids is back. Well, sort of. Atari (or whatever company is calling itself Atari these days) is reviving the classic 1979 shooter as an open-world survival MMO for some reason. Money, probably. Also a complete and ut...

Atari just announced a new Asteroids game. No, you guys, I'm being serious. Stop laughing!
Asteroids: Outpost, as it's called, is described as an open-world MMO with survivalist gameplay. The experience casts players in...

Area 52 is promising footage of RollerCoaster Tycoon World soon, presumably on or around the Game Developers Conference early next month. I look forward to seeing that, skeptical as I still am about the game. Until then, here...

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Yesterday, Alone in the Dark: Illumination went up for pre-order on Steam. The "Eldritch Edition," as it were, with a mildly reduced price, exclusive weapon and character skins, blah blah blah.
Today, Atari is finally showin...

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This concept art from Alone in the Dark: Illumination illustrate some of the environments in the game, and man, they're boring. From the grey concrete of an urban area to the grey scenic vistas of a mansion along the sho...

Sep 02 //
Alessandro Fillari
"It is a challenge to try and stay ahead of the game, if you will, to create new and exciting content for our users that expect something great," said Atari CEO Fred Chesnais. "One hand, it's a challenge -- and we love a challenge, and if we make mistakes we fix them. The other hand we have this community that's support is so communicative, so we can talk about it and give us input."
As with the previous games, you’re in charge with building and managing an amusement park. It’s your job to make sure the attractions are fun, the visitors are happy, and all the while making as much profit as possible. This time around, players have more options to make their own park unique. Everything from the park environment’s setting, stylistic aesthetic (such as Americana, Sci-Fi, and Western styles), and arrangement can be freely altered and shifted without any wait.
The way people play simulators has changed since the last RollerCoaster Tycoon game on PC 10 years ago. And with the return to the PC, the developers wanted to incorporate online features. Online play is robust and very extensive. Players can observe the creation and management of another player’s park, acquire blueprints for rides, and they can even engage in four-player co-op and create an amusement park together, with each player manning their own section.
But of course, if you’re not interested in playing online, you can build and manage your park in solitude offline.
"We thought it was super important to be playable offline and to offer more than just a simple sandbox mode," said Chesnais. "We understand that people want to play this game at their own pace, when they have the opportunity to play it. Additionally, we thought it was important for us to include co-op play. The competitive nature of so many of these games now is we see that so many people stay engaged, whether they can play co-op play environments. So we thought it was very important that they had that choice."
One of the core goals of RollerCoaster Tycoon World was to streamline the attraction building, while at the same time giving players more options to customize and refine the park to their liking. For instance, building rides now uses a node-based construction system.
Placing a node will set the first piece of the track, and each node gives players the option to lay or remove tracks, raise or lower height, and increase pitch for turns. This allows for players to create rides quickly, but is also deep and intricate enough to give the hardcore builders enough options to make something incredibly ambitious.
Moreover, when connected online, you can visit another player’s park and request the blueprint for rides that you like. With the blueprint you can recreate and tweak their ride to your liking. And yes, you can ride the coasters in first-person view to see the death-defying results up close.
While the game is still fairly early in development, the developers at Pipeworks are making good progress so far. When it'll be released is anyone's guess, but what I've seen showed that this new RollerCoaster sim is a return to what fans expect from the series.

CEO of Atari talks lessons learned and getting the series back on trackBack at gamescom, Atari announced RollerCoaster Tycoon World, a new installment to the much-loved amusement park series. However, after a 10-year series hiatus from the PC and the debut of the polarizing RollerCoaster Tycoon ...

Here are teasers for the previously announced Alone in the Dark and Haunted House reboots. Both are coming to PC this fall, so hopefully we'll have a few more spooky games to mess around with come Halloween time.

Horror this, horror that. 2014 is going to be known for the year the horror genre really took off again. Presumably because games like Slender Man, Outlast, and more have made some of the bigger companies realize th...

RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile was a hot mess, representing some of the worst traits of mobile and free-to-play gaming, but we knew that Atari was planning a PC game as well, one that promised to be different from the mobile ...

You ever hear of game developers living like rock stars? That's what Atari was doing back in the '80s when it was on top of the world. Then E.T. happened, and well, it all went wrong very quickly.
As part of Xbox's...

Holy Moons over My Hammy! While Denny's is remixing their foods as part of their new Greatest hits Remixed menu promotion they're also working with Atari to create some pretty weird videogame/food remixes. Expect flying hash ...

I don't know about you, but I have a very primal sort of rage about me when I dwell on the fact that I hadn't seen footage of Primal Rage 2 already. Luckily, there's a gaming mecca in Brookfield, Illinois that goes by the na...

I had no idea! There was a Primal Rage 2, but it was never finished.
Still, there are at least a couple arcade boards in existence of a prototype version, and Brookfield, Illinois-based Galloping Ghost Arcade has acquired on...

Nearly a month after Alamogordo, New Mexico saw the unearthing of the biggest stain on the videogame industry's past, the city commission had decided to sell 700 of the 1,300 dug-up E.T. cartridges. First though, the city ha...

Microsoft recently dragged a bunch of people down to the blistering New Mexico desert in hopes of finding the fabled E.T. videogame dump. They were successful, but they also found some other titles that only Conan's reporting on.
This is super serious business, guys.

As you may have heard, one of gaming's great urban legends was confirmed over the weekend. Atari did, in fact, dump a large quantity of retail copies of E.T. - The Extra-Terrestrial (and other games) in a New Mexico lan...

The legends are true. This weekend in Alamogordo, New Mexico, excavators uncovered the mythical cache of E.T. Atari 2600 cartridges, which were long rumored to have been dumped in the desert during the videogame crash of 1983...

TimeGate Studios was making a free-to-play third-person combat game called Minimum that seemed like it had potential. It continues to despite the fact that its creator went through bankruptcy. Now, publisher Atari has "worke...

In 1983, Atari buried unsold E.T. the Extra Terrestrial copies in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Now, it's (finally) being dug up and turned into a mini-documentary courtesy of Xbox Entertainment Studios.
The event takes place April 26, 2014 and is open to the public. E.T. designer Howard Scott Warshaw will be there. Will you?

The previous videogame-themed collection of eBooks from Story Bundle kept me well read for quite some time, so I'm more than ready to dip into the new 3.0 bundle.
There's some really eye-catching titles in the bundle, includi...

It's crummy that our gut reaction to a new RollerCoaster Tycoon happening was that of concern instead of sheer joy. After RollerCoaster Tycoon 4 Mobile was announced for iOS, we learned that Atari has plans for a "PC experien...

RollerCoaster Tycoon was announced for iOS this past week. The response was as expected, and our own Jordan Devore in particular was pretty bummed out that it was coming just for mobile devices.
Well turn that frown upside do...